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Nora Fyles becomes new Head of UNGEI Secretariat

New York, 22 August 2012 – Nora Fyles has assumed the role of Head of the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI) Secretariat. She is the third Head of UNGEI since it was launched in 2000 by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Fyles said her top priorities are to “help UNGEI strengthen the partnership’s work at the country level, develop a rich reference base on girls’ education and gender equality, create a new approach to governance and advice, and build a policy agenda so that UNGEI (continues to) speak with a strategic and effective voice.”

UNGEI, the Education for All (EFA) flagship for girls' education, is a partnership that embraces the United Nations system, governments, donor countries, non-governmental organizations, civil society, the private sector, and communities and families. UNGEI provides stakeholders with a platform for action and galvanizes their efforts to enable girls as well as boys to complete a quality education – an essential step towards sustainable development and the eradication of poverty.

“The UNGEI partnership,” said Fyles, “is well placed to help to ensure that countries refocus attention on eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education as a necessary precursor to its elimination at all levels by 2015.”

Since 2003, Nora has worked for the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), where she represented the agency in key global partnerships, such as UNGEI, the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), the UNAIDS Interagency task team on education (IATT) and the EFA International Advisory Panel.